Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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I hoped to climb a ladder to the sky; The muse sends me to the market; The minstrel is a refugee
No full textThe Meanings of Malacca: Identity and Exile in the Writings of Ee Tiang Hong, Shirley Lim and Simone Lazaroo
Get PDFMalacca, through five centuries an important trading port, was conquered by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and the Japanese in turn, so that while it is part of contemporary Malaysia it has maintained a sense of distinctive identity, the home of Baba-Nonya culture. The poet Ee Tiang Hong, the novelist Simone Lazaroo, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, both poet and novelist, all have their roots there but each left, at different ages and for different reasons. They are of slightly different generations and have different personal histories, but each has been drawn back to Malacca in their writings, as if this was necessary to make sense of themselves and their own view of the world. Ee claims Malacca as “a state of mind†which enabled him to “draw strength from many cultural springs.†For Lim her Malaccan self has remained “a fugitive presence,†not so much “a town but… a familiar spirit.†In Lazaroo’s The World Waiting to be Made, Malacca is a site of myth and mysterious supernatural power.   For all three, Malacca is to some degree chthonic, traditional, bearing markers of another time. In a post-modern, fast-paced, high tech world what resonances can these ways of conceiving life have across borders? This paper explores the meanings of Malacca in the three writers’ poems and novels to see what is common and what is different about the Malacca they present, and to what extent it has continuing importance, for them and for us.Â
“The Persian Prince in Londonâ€: Autoethnography and Positionality in Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan
No full textThis paper explores the strategies and dynamics of Asian representation of the self and the colonial other in Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810). I argue that while the process of autoethnography in an early period of colonisation anticipates the subsequent oscillation between submission and resistance, such representations are made complex by the positionality of the author within his milieu. Taleb’s text is marked by the ambiguity of his response to colonialism, engaging in a simultaneous admiration and critique of western practices, a critique that is made possible by his identity as the “Persian Prince.†Yet in its history of print, circulation and reception it becomes a tool in the propagation of colonial power
TESL Undergraduates’ Ability to Handle Academic Text-types at University Malaysia Sarawak
Get PDFThis case study examined the ability of TESL undergraduates to handle five text-types commonly required by their assignments, with a specific focus on the structure and language features significant to the text-type. Stratified random sampling was used to obtain 60 coursework assignments across five text-types from undergraduates in the Teaching of English as a Second Language (TESL) degree programme at University Malaysia Sarawak: argument, explanation, discussion, instruction and information report. Genre analysis of the assignments using the frameworks of Feez and Derewianka showed that the information report and explanation text-types were the most difficult in terms of the generic structure.The results showed that the undergraduates were familiar with the staging of argument and discussion but the ideas were sometimes not effectively developed within the stages. The analysis of linguistic choices indicated good use of relevant language features to fulfil the purpose of the text-type in 27 assignments but the rest of the assignments contained unsatisfactory use of modal verbs and conditional clauses to present arguments and connectors to show sequence of steps in assignments requiring explanations
